Sanitas Radio | Because your health and longevity should not be classified information.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Coffee May Protect the Liver

Drinking coffee — even decaffeinated coffee — may protect your liver, a large new study has found.

Researchers examined
the coffee-drinking habits of 27,793 people who filled out diet
questionnaires in a large national health study from 1999 to 2010. The
scientists also tracked blood levels of four enzymes that indicate liver
function. The study is online in Hepatology.

More than 14,000 of
the subjects drank coffee. After controlling for age, sex, race,
education, smoking, alcohol consumption and other factors, the
researchers found that compared with people who drank no coffee, those
who drank three cups a day were about 25 percent less likely to have abnormal liver enzyme levels. Among the more than 2,000 who drank only decaffeinated coffee, the results were similar.

The reason for the effect is unclear. “There are more than a thousand compounds in coffee,” said the lead author, Qian Xiao, a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute. “There are a few candidates, but I don’t know which is responsible.”